


By Any Name I Call You Beloved

by Shinybug



Category: Merlin (TV), Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Drama, Established Relationship, First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-23
Updated: 2011-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-23 00:06:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shinybug/pseuds/Shinybug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin felt the darkness curl around his heart but he smiled, because it was all right, his brother was alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Any Name I Call You Beloved

*~*~*~*

When Merlin dreamed, he saw the future. Lately he saw it often enough waking too, a strange double vision of what he was doing and what he would do, someday. Little things, usually, and then sometimes he would see larger pieces: him, Arthur, thin shards of time fitting together in a mosaic that shaped the color of destiny. Sometimes he would wake himself and Arthur too with strange music from unseen troubadours or the slow invasion of a wild faerie garden through their bedroom. Other times he would wake crying, Arthur's hand on his shoulder, Arthur's mouth on his cheeks and the shadowed places beneath his eyes.

One night Merlin dreamed something else entirely.

He dreamed he was not himself. He was standing on a battlefield, a dusty desert plain muddied with red that had splashed up on his boots and his hands, which were both larger than his own. Overhead the sky was heavy, dove-gray and crackling, ready to burst. Bodies were scattered around him as far as the eye could see like chess pieces from an overturned table, littering the ground like a plague had befallen heaven and earth and all the angels had been struck down.

They looked like men, but some of them were angels on the inside, he realized, feathers materializing and catching in the wind, sticking to his bloodied hands and his heavy blue trousers. Others were twisted and ugly beneath their masks of human skin, horned and cloven where the angels were pale and perfect as snow, and black marks scorched the earth around their bodies. But the blood was red, rusty and vivid, regardless of who shed it.

Before him, a well-dressed man with black eyes knelt in a pool of blood, body broken but laughing softly, his voice like iron bells and the clashing of serrated blades at once. Merlin stretched his hand toward the man-- _demon_ , he thought, _Morning Star_ \--and magic poured from his fingers like lightning and pulled the soul from the human vessel. It stretched thin like spun sugar, blackened, and the laughter became screaming that shook the earth, and Merlin sank to his knees with the agony of it but never let go of the magic that burned through his hand, even when it began to double back. Darkness flowed like poison up through Merlin's veins, encroaching upon him and invading him, and there was a fire in his skull that was spreading too fast to follow.

Dark, thick blood, sweet and coppery, began to slide from his nostrils, catching on his lips. It tickled, distracted, and he lifted his other hand absently to wipe it away. He knew himself to be dying, and still he tried.

The weight of the world rested on this demon's death.

And then Merlin saw a man rising up behind the demon, limping and listing heavily, covered in blood and gray feathers that shone in the last glimmer of daylight. _Arthur_ , he thought, but it wasn't, he wore a different face but he was _beautiful_ and familiar in the dream. Beloved.

Merlin felt the darkness curl around his heart but he smiled, because it was all right, his brother was alive. And as he fell he saw his brother clutching a knife in his fist, bone-handled and ancient, and it sang to Merlin a song of death and of the fire that waits, hidden inside blackened coals. His brother raised the knife and let out a cry that drowned out the demon's scream, a cry of finality and triumph as well as despair, and sank that knife to the hilt between the demon's shoulder blades.

The darkness slipped from Merlin's skin and bones like rain into the parched earth, and the smell of sulfur burned his lungs when he began to take great heaving breaths, alive still. He pressed his hands to his face, smearing blood and dirt and tears, and he could see the fallen even through his closed eyes. And then his brother was there, dragging him up and kneeling with him, holding him tight enough to bruise while Merlin cried sticky tears into his brother's neck.

"Sam, _Sam_ ," his brother said, his voice raw and rough, carrying too many emotions to read any one as dominant. "We've gotta stop doing this, seriously man."

"It's gone," Merlin said in Sam's voice, pulling back to look at Dean's face, hold it in his hands. "It's gone, all of it, every drop." He lifted his hands in front of Dean's face, as though to show him what was beneath the skin, and although gore and ruin was all they could see on the surface, Dean seemed to understand, and his eyes filled up with a desperate hope as he leaned in to kiss Sam very much unlike a brother. And Sam would have been shocked except he'd been waiting his whole life for it, had spent every unthinking moment of his life reaching for Dean, waiting for him to reach back.

So Sam kissed him in return, messy and tasting of blood and dirt and full of every good thing he'd never felt before, clean and new, the fire in his blood now made of love, the purest kind.

The rain began to fall, softly like a benediction from an unseen hand, mingling with the blood into rivulets that ran over the dry earth and quenched it, death returning to life. Dean hauled Sam up by fistfuls of his shirt and together they stumbled to a chariot that gleamed black and metallic in the half-light and rain, a sleekly hulking thing that sat quietly and let them lean on it a while, surveying the field.

"It's too bad we had to destroy the world to save it," Dean said, his shaking hand still hooked in Sam's shirt like he might try to get away.

"Well. It's not all gone. The good parts are still here, anyway," Sam reasoned, looking at Dean through the rain, at the light in his eyes that he would know anywhere, blind and in the dark.

"You are such a girl, Sammy," Dean said, shaking his head, but his tears were spilling over when he leaned in again and kissed him, mouth soft and open, and Sam knew a moment of vertigo and he blinked and there was Arthur again in the bed beside him, sleeping and golden in the dying firelight, and Merlin reached out for him with trembling fingers.

Arthur roused at Merlin's hand on his bare shoulder, shifting into his touch, pulling Merlin beneath him so that he could lay his head on Merlin's shoulder. He was still mostly asleep, Merlin realized, and so he did not raise his head to kiss the tears on Merlin's face.

"I dreamt I killed the devil," Arthur mumbled into Merlin's neck, lips moving across his skin like the brush of feathers. "I had a knife, and a dark horse made of iron, and you were dying. Your hands were...black..."

"Just a dream," Merlin whispered, running his fingers through the cornsilk of Arthur's hair, listening to the rain falling against the window. "I'm right here with you, always."

"Don't leave me," Arthur mumbled, his breathing slowing into sleep, his weight settling into Merlin like blood into earth.

"I won't," Merlin answered, and knew it was true.

*~*~*~*  
end

**Author's Note:**

> This was written before season 5 of Supernatural, and obviously deviates from later canon. A big thank you to my beloved beta Alexia. :)


End file.
